“Y’all have to help me find my Gruncle and get the bee smoker!” a small voice cried. A tiny, dark-haired girl in jeans and a Barbie shirt bounded down the hill, clambering over the stone rims of terraced flower beds, a mound of wavy hair dancing as she hit level ground, her face streaked with tears. With that radar kids have for me, she headed straight my way, snared my hand, and tugged. “Excuse me, sir, but I need a ride to the front barns to get Gruncle Thackery and tell him to bring the bee smoker! My Aunt Hush is covered in a whole swarm of yellow jackets!” She held up a red, swollen forefinger. “Look what happened to me! I got stung by just one of them!”
Aunt Hush. Covered. Swarm. Bees. Stung. Those were the words I heard. I bent down to the kid, gripping her small hand carefully. “What’s your Aunt Hush doing right now?”
“Waiting for help! Hurry! They’re all over her!” She pointed toward a barn roof peeking above distant tree tops. “Over there!”
“I’ll take care of her.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I scooped my hands under her armpits, picked her up, turned, and handed her bodily to one of the men. “Find Gruncle, whoever that is. I’ll go to the barn.”
The agent looked toward Lucille. She nodded. “Tom, Hernando, you stay here.” Then, to me, “I’ll go get her son. And call an ambulance.” Lucille bolted for the house, pulling a cell phone from her pants pocket.
I ran up the terraces, jumping fieldstone borders, then climbing through late-blooming azaleas, low jungles of lavender mums, and the sharp, browning fronds of summer irises. I reached the oak trees and sprinted beneath their red-tinged limbs, heading for the weathered barn beyond the small pasture. Through a dark opening at the barn’s side I heard no screams and saw nothing but filtered shafts of afternoon sunlight. But I had a mental image of Hush Thackery being stung to death in some freak accident that would turn this peculiar day into a nightmare.
WHEN I WAS JUST a tiny girl, a few years before my father died while digging up blackberry briars in the orchards, he took me and Mama over to Dalyrimple to see the Fourth of July parade, courtesy of the Chocinaw County VFW, a borrowed color guard from the ROTC unit at North Georgia College, and the Chocinaw County High School Band, playing loud and slightly off-key Sousa marches. The town was as old as the gray bricks of the courthouse, shaded by hickory trees that would thump a child on the head in the autumn with nuts as hard as opinions.
Farlo Dalyrimple’s dachshunds slept safely in the lazy streets, looking like furry sausages who moved only when someone honked at them. Ancient Ulaine Dalyrimple Baggett, who taught music for free to the poor mountain kids, including me, kept the town’s slow tempo from the front porch of her grandson’s hardware store. In the late 1960’s, Dalyrimple was Mayberry.
We sat on the edge of the store’s porch, Mama on the left side of Mrs. Baggett’s rocker, Daddy and me on the right side. Mrs. Baggett sang May The Circle Be Unbroken in a low alto, and I harmonized with her. As we sang and watched the parade, fat bumblebees began to bumble over to me from Mrs. Baggett’s rose bushes. I didn’t yet know I had sugar skin, but I wasn’t afraid of the bees, having already learned that most never stung me.
One by one the bumblebees settled on my hair and face, while Daddy, Mama, and Mrs. Baggett watched the parade, unaware. Suddenly Mrs. Baggett stopped singing and said in her calm, crackling old voice, “John Albert McGillen, your child’s sung the bees in for a landing.”
Daddy and Mama swiveled quickly to look at me. I sat there, as calm as a calf chewing its cud, with several dozen tubby bees clinging to my face and hair. Mama said not one word but reached for a pair of small American flags Mrs. Baggett had stuck in a flower pot full of geraniums. “Excuse me, Mrs. Baggett, but I’m going to use your flags to shoo these bumbles off Hush.”
“No need,” Daddy said. Worn and lean, with dark auburn hair sliding back from his forehead like a retreating fire, he had the warmest smile of any man in the world, and a nature so quiet bees lit on him, too. He pulled a long-stemmed pipe from the breast pocket of his blue-checkered Sunday shirt, packed it with tobacco from a leather pouch in his trousers, lit it with a stick match he scratched on the inside of his leathery palm, and exhaled a slow breath of smoke over me.
The bumblebees ambled away in duets and quartets of winged whirring. “Listen to them harmonize,” Mrs. Baggett said. “John Albert, you’re a wonder. You made the bees sing, too.”
My heart swelled with the amazement of small miracles and the awe the luckiest children feel for a parent at least once in their lives. Daddy saved me. A permanent stamp of McGillen bee-magic already existed between my father and me, but that moment sealed it. He smiled at me then faced forward to watch the parade, again, while Mama exhaled with relief and re-planted Mrs. Baggett’s small flags in the geraniums.
Mrs. Baggett, the last, grand keeper of southern womanhood in the tradition of spiritual song, bent over the arm of her rocker and beckoned me with a finger as gnarled as the branch on my own Great Lady. When I edged close, she said softly, “Your Daddy’s a bee charmer, like you. Any man who can charm bees has a soul of special courage and mighty kindness. You remember that. Always be on the lookout for a bee-charming man. He has a special sort of music in his heart.”
I put a hand to my own heart, and nodded. A small, rebel bumblebee returned and lit on my hand as I made that vow, overhearing it, so it could be told to bees the world over. But Mrs. Baggett died the next spring without further counsel to me, and Daddy a few years later, and then Davy came along, and my vow was broken.
I had never found a bee-charming man.
Until the day, that fall, when Nick Jakobek arrived.
I HEARD THE RUNNING FOOTSTEPS. That’s not Gruncle, I thought. And not Davis. Davis runs like a giraffe. Slow and gallumping. I turned my head carefully so as not to disturb the half-dozen yellow jackets that clung like pets to my cheeks and forehead and near the corners of my mouth. The barn’s side entrance made a tall, clean rectangle of gray logs framing the blue-pink afternoon light outside like a bright window in a dark room. Forced to sit still, I felt hypnotized by the contrast of light, the footsteps that couldn’t belong to my elderly Gruncle, and the slow thud of my own heart. Here and yon, a small yellow jacket lifted off my covered hands and wrists, seeking a new location on my skin, fitting himself in among his crowded brethren on the pew of my arms. Like a church choir caught in the spirit, they moved to their own rhythm. Mrs. Baggett would have been proud of them.
The footsteps halted. The strong silhouette of a man suddenly loomed in the entranceway’s frame of light and trees. I saw his long legs spread slightly apart, his arms splay by his sides in readiness, all of him backlit against a coppery blur of the distant house oaks. The yellow jackets shifted ominously.
He took a step forward. “Hold on, there,” I called in a low voice. “Be still or they’ll come after you.”
“How badly are you hurt?” His voice was deep, calm, not Southern, but still. A good, strong voice. I wouldn’t forget it, or the way he asked that question.
“I’m not hurt at all, thank you. I just have a talent for attracting bees.” I blew out gently as a small bee tickled my lower lip. It inched away. Chill bumps washed over my skin. The stranger moved forward, walking carefully for a tall man. I opened my mouth to warn him off again, but the words never came out. He stopped in a finger of sunlight.
He looked down at me with a kind of wonder.
And I looked up at him like a child in church.
He had a stark and rugged face with no small share of wear and tear on it, a thick crown of hair more black than brown, and dark eyes that reduced the world to me. Only me. He raised a hand to his chest and slid his fingers into the breast pocket of a rumpled flannel shirt tucked into loose brown corduroys with scuffed hiking boots. He pulled a long cigar from the pocket, at the same time gracefully f
ilching a silver lighter from a front pocket of his pants. I watched him flick the cigar’s cellophane wrapping aside and nip off the stogie’s puckered end with a quick tug of his teeth.
I held my breath.
He slid the cigar tip between his lips and teeth, cupped one large and capable looking hand around the cigar’s business end, thumbed a flame from the lighter, and lit the cigar with the calm ceremony of a man who knows just how much breath it takes to coax fire and tobacco together in a dance. He blew out, and a soft gray cloud of sweet-scented smoke floated toward me. “Let’s see what we can do,” he said. He eased forward and knelt down on one knee within arm’s reach of me.
The slanted sunshine cast one side of our faces in light, the other in shadows. I glimpsed him down inside himself, and liked what I saw, or thought I saw. Trust rose between us like the bubble in a carpenter’s level. We had a balance, just temporary, perhaps, but enough to tame this moment. He drew in on the cigar, then exhaled a slow breath of aromatic smoke and the rush of air from his lungs, enveloping me.
The yellow jackets didn’t so much as buzz at him.
My heart settled back against my spine in wonder.
I had finally met a bee-charming man.
The yellow jackets began to lift from my skin. I raised my hands. Dozens of them rose from them and drifted in the smoke, more lazy than annoyed, floating on the currents of this stranger’s breath until they followed the smoke between a crack in the boards of the wall, and disappeared. I never took my eyes off the stranger’s face, until suddenly I realized my hands and arms were empty.
He lifted his left hand and curved it near my cheek to guide a new breath of smoke from his lips. A few bees still crept over my face, stubborn. I leaned toward him with my face tilted into the sweet cloud and the scent of his breath, and he moved a little nearer, too, until we could have kissed. That close. I felt the warmth of his skin near mine. That close. He sent small puffs of air, slow exhalations, against my eyes, my cheeks, and finally, when there was only one last yellow jacket tickling the corner of my mouth, he leaned in one degree more, his gaze shifting from my mouth to my eyes, and blew one last, small stream of air directly into my parted lips. The tiny bee drifted upward and disappeared into a slot of sunlight between the old barn’s boards.
We didn’t sit back at a safe distance. We looked at each other with a frowning mix of affection and surprise and sexual heat. I think we both knew, at that moment, that we were going to cause each other joy and misery. In more ways than one.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” he asked.
“Of the bees? Or of you?”
“Both.”
“I trust the bees’ opinion of you. And they trust you.”
Something came into his eyes, wishful and hard. “Mrs. Thackery,” he said quietly. “My name’s Nick Jakobek, and I’m here to take Eddie back where she belongs.”
I drew in a hard breath and nodded. “Good.”
AND SO A FALL that had started in a Texas military compound had come down to this: There I stood in a friendly barn in Georgia, a part of the world where I knew more about stereotypes than actual human beings, surrounded by antique farm equipment and the scent of warm apples and sweet hay and mountain air, watching an incredible woman calmly stare at me from her seat on a carving bench, where she’d been covered in small yellow bees. Hush McGillen Thackery wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life, but she was the hardest to look away from, starting with that moment. I was aroused, and I was awkward, and I was surprised. The fact that I could hide all that turmoil doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. The rescue and the nameless introduction and the helpless bondage of desire between strangers. All there.
Like the bees, I wanted to know how she tasted, and why she made me like her so easily.
And why she said what she said about Eddie.
And just why, in general.
THERE WAS JUST ENOUGH time for Nick Jakobek’s dark eyes to color with puzzlement—I guess he expected me to covet a Presidential daughter—but before we could say anything else the rattle of a heavy can broke the spell. I stood as if we’d been caught doing something wrong. Jakobek stood slower, eyes shuttered. He had better control of his weaknesses than I had of mine, or less pent-up frustration. His sex life probably did not center around a vibrating massage pillow.
Be that as it may. To my horror, Davis and Eddie stood frozen in the barn’s doorway. Davis bent and picked up a long-nozzled can wisping soft white puffs of smoke. “I know who you are, Lt. Colonel, and I know your reputation, but you can’t intimidate me. Or my mother.”
Jakobek said in a low voice, “Mr. Thackery, you and I need to talk in private, before you jump to any more conclusions about me or about my intentions.” His intense stillness raised the hair on the back of my neck. I watched the slightest flex of a sinew in his neck and the tight posture of his body—the set of his shoulders, the casual, strong parentheses his big hands made, hanging deceptively calm alongside his lean hips.
I intervened quickly. “There won’t be any conversations without me present. You hear?”
He looked at me for just one second, frowning. “I’m not here to hurt your son. You have my word. I’m here to get answers. And to make certain Eddie’s safe.”
“Fine. But there’ll be no confrontations between you and my family.”
He nodded just slightly. I had been saluted, but with conditions.
“I’m being discussed,” Davis said tightly. “Not consulted.”
Eddie held out her hands to Jakobek. “Nicky. Please don’t tell me that Mother and Dad asked you to come get me, and you agreed. Not you, too. Not you. Planning to order me around? Treat me like a child who has to be rescued? Lecture me?”
“I’m here to find out if you’re all right. That’s all.”
“Then I’m fine. Your question is answered.”
“You look sick and scared, to me. What you’ve done makes no sense. I just want to make certain you weren’t . . . coerced.”
“Coerced?” Davis said in a low voice. “You’re accusing me—”
Eddie laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Nicky, people have turning points in their lives. Moments in which everything they’ve been told to think about themselves and their place in the world suddenly no longer fits. When a moment like that occurs, a wise person knows to turn down a different path. That’s what I’ve done, Nicky. Made a quick but infinitely wise decision to leave behind the trappings of a life that had stopped being my own.”
“Your folks never pushed you to live in their spotlight.”
“Oh, Nicky, of course they did. A child can’t escape a light as bright as theirs.”
“They’ve done everything to protect you.”
“I know, and I’ve always felt like a bird in a cage.”
“That still doesn’t explain making a run down the East Coast with your Secret Service contingent in tow. Why? You and Mr. Thackery couldn’t get on a plane and come to visit his mama?”
“Mother,” I corrected stiffly. “His mother.”
As Jakobek gave me a quizzical glance, Davis stepped forward. “Eddie was tired of having every move reported to her parents. No grown child of President in the past fifty years has been watched the way she’s been watched.”
“The world isn’t as safe as it used to be, Mr. Thackery.”
“My mother spies on me,” Eddie announced. “Did you know that, Nicky?”
Jakobek frowned. “Your mother is tough, but she’s too honorable to do something like—” He hesitating, frowning harder—“your mother has good reason to be a little over protective after what happened—”
“Nicky, don’t tell me this started when that man tried to kill us. I’ve heard that for years, but I just don’t think it excuses her. She’s become hard and angry and mean-spirited, Nicky. All
these years I’ve watched her grow more sarcastic and less flexible and more tyrannical as Dad moved up the ranks in politics and our family became even more of a public target. But she really started to change when I turned eighteen and Dad won the election. In the three years since then, all of Mother’s controlling instincts have converged on one goal—keeping Dad and me under her thumb.”
“Keeping you both safe,” Jakobek corrected.
“Well, it’s too much. I’ve been forced to make this drastic change in order to escape from her. And I think Dad will understand.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Jakobek turned his hard scrutiny to Davis. “In the meantime, Mr. Thackery, you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“No, respectfully, sir, but what Eddie and I have done is none of your business. She wants you to leave.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Whoa,” I said. I stepped between them. “Davis, the man’s here to talk, and he’s representing Eddie’s family, and you owe him that courtesy. Eddie, I know you’re so mad at your mother you can’t see straight, but you can’t refuse to at least hear out her messenger.” I raised my voice. “And there’ll be no more ultimatums issued, except by me. Or else.”
Eddie shook her head. Her eyes glowed with tears as she gazed at Jakobek. I had no doubt in mind of her affection for the big, brutal-looking man they’d sent to fetch her. Was he a killer? Maybe. But he was a bee charmer, too. And that took kindness.
“Nicky, I’m sorry, but you can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.” Eddie wiped her eyes. “I’m not going anywhere with you, and I’m not even going to continue this conversation. You obviously don’t understand my motives, and you assume I’ve made a foolish choice simply because it’s not my typical behavior.” She pivoted and walked out of the barn.
Nick Jakobek started after her. Davis blocked his way, fists clenched. “She asked you to leave her alone. Now, I’m telling you.”